X-Force: The Name of the X-Men’s Newest Threat is Finally Revealed
Phillip Pratt
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The X-Men’s struggle to create a mutant-nation has logically enveloped most of the narrative coming out of House of X and Powers of X. Individual books have ostensibly covered a different aspect of the creation of Krakoa and how its development is affecting the isle’s citizens.
Marauders address the business side, both above and below-board.
New Mutants is all about the youth of the nation – thus its future – and how they chose to interact with the outside world, even other worlds.
X-Men is the truest to form book as it depicts the Summers-family and friends functioning as a strike team – not unlike what squads have traditionally done in the past.
Excalibur is doing something in Otherworld. When it matters, I’ll let you know.
X-Force is somewhat different. Like the X-Men, they are proactive, but dissimilar from their flag-ship team in how they operate. In many ways, they are Krakoa’s counter-intelligence agency. In the first issue of the title, Krakoa is attacked by a small group of operatives.
They gained access to the island without being immediately thwarted by skydiving onto the isle using bits of obtained bio-mass to mask their approach. They came into possession of said tissue after discovering and apprehending Domino – she’d been sent earlier to infiltrate and report back on any threats to Krakoa.
With Domino’s skin grafted onto various parts of their body, they were able to get the drop on the Krakoans which led to the deaths of a couple dozen of its citizens, including their primary target, Professor-X.
In total there were only five would-be assailants. Four of the five were killed in various ways by Beast, Black Tom, and others but Xavier’s trigger-man barely survived a brush with Wolverine.
After examining his body and attempting to read his mind, they learned much about his and his deceased compatriots’ bodies – outside of wearing Domino’s skin.
For one, they were laced with various weapons and tools including a bone-shiv placed in the forearms, multi-use cord, and explosives.
In issue #2, Wolverine and Kid Omega discover that they were also engineered from the ground up – designer soldiers. The remains of which explode upon death.
By the end of the third issue of X-Force, we not only knew the intentions of the organization that sent the bio-soldiers to Krakoa but also its name. Xeno.
Constructed of various ‘shadow organizations’ from around the world, they are hellbent on disrupting and hopefully ridding the world of the Krakoa menace. Whether they just want to stop Krakoa’s exponential growth or erase mutant-kind altogether, has yet to be revealed.
The group is very much a more modern spin on X-Men hate groups of the past such as the Friends of Humanity and the Purifiers. Getting with the times – like the cybernetic villains, Reavers – they use science to advance their efforts but also employ information to control the narrative and how close the Krakoan agents can get to them using conventional means, such as the internet or studying paper trails.
At the moment, the identities of the Xeno members are unknown – they all wear masks, even in the presence of one another, it seems.
The leader is described as having a peacock tattoo, but in terms of identification, that’s about it. The only clues Krakoa possesses originate from the now destroyed bodies, the accounts of Wolverine and Kid Omega, and Domino’s fractured, drug-compromised memories.
As the story progresses, I expect Xeno to become as big of a threat to the future of mutant-kind as Orchis.
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